Yea, this is kind of old news, isn’t it?
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As I commented last time:
Oops, I see @drjenkins beat me to it.
Soviets glorified child spies too:
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I don’t think it’s invoking godwin if it’s a historical fact that has resonance with the article? Also, Godwin’s law is really just descriptive, rather than attempting to stop any discussion of nazis…
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Because then you are no longer the Good Guys.
Being good is something you do, not something you are.
Not alone in this kind of way of being counterinsurgent but British military intelligence were, literally, the loyalist terrorists, terrorists themselves, and the murder discipline wing of the IRA.
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Works for me! I was using it as a verb I guess.
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In my high school years, I had a weekend job working the cash register at a dry cleaning store. One Saturday, a 50-ish (perhaps in the boing boing sense?) gentleman walked in, eventually getting around to asking me why his slacks, “brought in 3 weeks ago Friday” for alterations, were not ready yet. With him was, presumably, his grandson, age maybe 8 or so, who came to the rescue and blurts out, “No! You brought them here yesterday.” Grandpa’s eyes got big, he smiled a brittle smile, and said nothing. I have mixed feelings about the effectiveness of using children on covert operations.
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Sorry if I’m mis-understanding, but don’t you mean the UDA?
What’s interesting is that it really is old news. The BB article itself is fine since it’s reporting on the fact that someone else is reporting that there’s a court challenge - that’s new.
But the Telegraph article refers to “documents before the court” as if they are newly emerged evidence.
From what they quote, it appears they mean “the correspondence between the Minister and the House of Lords’ Committee which was published in the appendix to the Committee’s report”.
So, very much old news sold as “shock! New!”
No. A really important part of intelligence penetrating an organisation is ensuring they protect their penetration and making sure their informants don’t get discovered.
British intelligence in the IRA used to uncover people about to uncover them and have them murdered as informants.
So they murdered people themselves (either for shits and giggles or for strategic reasons), they ran loyalist terrorists to murder people (as above), and they also used IRA terrorists to murder people. All the while the British public saw them as the “Good Guys”, But imperialism is always like that everywhere.
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Them too.
I bow to @robertmckenna’s greater knowledge but in the meantime, I’d guess he’s referring to things such as:
One of those being their head of ‘internal security’.
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Thanks for both the replies, it’s an aspect of the Troubles I wasn’t really aware of.
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Yeah, there’s lots, lots more. But my real point isn’t about the North, it’s about undercover intelligence in general. Cops deal drugs, spies kill civiliians, intelligence operatives kill lawyers all while presenting themselves as the “Good Guys”. They literally do the exact things they are supposedly working against. “Good Guys” is an identity for state actors utterly divorced from the actual things they do.
Patriotism!
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Yes, it seems to be an inevitable result of any kind of intelligence work but undercover policing (whether done by cops or soldiers) especially.
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Oh, that’s totally allowed, we probably all use it that way. I’m just saying I think he was meaning to be descriptive of how internet conversations work…
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#fishwrapping
You just reminded me that my feeling of disconnection with being English or British is nothing new.
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Yeah, but I think we (I) have to have sympathy for my friends for whom a British identity is a multicultural choice as English has been hijacked by the far right. I mean from my perspective Britain was always an imperial projection of English power but another idea in a post colo ial world was possible. The window on that seems to be shutting with the Brexit Bros and the hostile environment for english/British people that don’t look like those white Etonian bros.
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